Archives for August 2016

Version 4.0 of the PCIe computer bus standard will arrive in 2017 according to PCMag.

Version 4.0 of the PCIe specification, which will introduce greatly increased speeds as well as other improvements intended to make it viable in a wider range of applications, is slated to be released in early 2017. PCIe 4.0 will essentially double the interconnect performance bandwidth of the current 3.0 specification, from 8 gigatransfers per second (GTps) to 16GTps. In addition, it introduces new technologies to enhance power efficiency: the use of an L1 substate that drastically lowers power use in idle mode; half-swing and quarter-swing, which cut power consumption by 400mV and 200mV, respectively; and high-speed data transfer bursts with minimum idle power.

Microsoft loves Linux. And Open Source. That wasn’t always the case back then. From Ars Technica:

Microsoft today released its PowerShell scripting language and command-line shell as open source. The project joins .NET and the Chakra JavaScript engine as an MIT-licensed open source project hosted on GitHub. Alpha version prebuilt packages of the open source version are available for CentOS, Ubuntu, and OS X, in addition, of course, to Windows. Additional platforms are promised in the future.

Digital Ocean snapshots are no longer free. Starting October 1, 2016, Digital Ocean will start charging for snapshots at 5 cents per GB. Here are some of the highlights:

Starting October 1, 2016, we will begin charging for snapshot storage at $0.05 per gigabyte per month. This will first be reflected in the invoice posted to your account on November 1, 2016. Like other features, snapshot storage uses hourly pricing, and size is calculated from a compressed version of the snapshot—not the total disk space allocated to the Droplet. Also, you can now take Droplet snapshots without having to power off the Droplet. You can see this in action by taking a snapshot of a Droplet while it’s still running. Over the coming weeks, we will update the Snapshots page to show the costs associated with your snapshot storage more easily and we’ll also send another reminder before charges begin on October 1, 2016. Be sure to see your usage on the Snapshots page and delete unused snapshots to avoid any unexpected charges.